Top 150 Tim O'Brien Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.”

— Tim O'Brien

102. “In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.”

— Tim O'Brien

103. “There is always the threat of tomorrow’s treachery, or next year’s treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.”

— Tim O'Brien

104. “But in a story I can steal her soul.”

— Tim O'Brien

105. “Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter – like a wail – acknowledges and replies to pain.”

— Tim O'Brien

106. “Imagination, like reality, has its limits.”

— Tim O'Brien

107. “Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”

— Tim O'Brien

108. “You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To.”

— Tim O'Brien

109. “Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear – wisely.”

— Tim O'Brien

110. “Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.”

— Tim O'Brien

111. “In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”

— Tim O'Brien

112. “I’m young and happy. I’ll never die.”

— Tim O'Brien

113. “And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”

— Tim O'Brien

114. “Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.”

— Tim O'Brien

115. “Nostalgia – that’s the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.”

— Tim O'Brien

116. “He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone – riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria – even dancing, she danced alone – and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.”

— Tim O'Brien

117. “Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?”

— Tim O'Brien

118. “Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.”

— Tim O'Brien

119. “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.”

— Tim O'Brien

120. “What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.”

— Tim O'Brien

121. “Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.”

— Tim O'Brien

122. “I hope so. Except I’m afraid to look at myself. Literally. I can’t even look at my own eyes in the mirror, not for long. I’m afraid I won’t be there.”

— Tim O'Brien

123. “He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.”

— Tim O'Brien

124. “What they carried varied by mission.”

— Tim O'Brien

125. “It’s very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.”

— Tim O'Brien

126. “Stories are for joining the past to the future.”

— Tim O'Brien

127. “It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

— Tim O'Brien

128. “They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”

— Tim O'Brien

129. “I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some... thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open.”

— Tim O'Brien

130. “Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it’s not science, it’s an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.”

— Tim O'Brien

131. “Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive when you’re almost dead.”

— Tim O'Brien

132. “The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.”

— Tim O'Brien

133. “Stories can save us.”

— Tim O'Brien

134. “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”

— Tim O'Brien

135. “Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.”

— Tim O'Brien

136. “Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.”

— Tim O'Brien

137. “Large effects might come from small causes.”

— Tim O'Brien

138. “This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.”

— Tim O'Brien

139. “I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.”

— Tim O'Brien

140. “Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?”

— Tim O'Brien

141. “If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?”

— Tim O'Brien

142. “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.”

— Tim O'Brien

143. “Maybe it’s a crackpot theory, but in the aftermath of my sickness, I’ve often wondered if what we call insanity might be a biological response to mankind’s consciousness of its own mortality, a way of unknowing what we know, a defense against the specter of nothingness and foreverness and intolerable finality.”

— Tim O'Brien

144. “Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.”

— Tim O'Brien

145. “What is love, for God’s sake, if not the most distilled obsession?”

— Tim O'Brien

146. “But this, too, was a performance.”

— Tim O'Brien

147. “I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.”

— Tim O'Brien

148. “You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”

— Tim O'Brien

149. “For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.”

— Tim O'Brien

150. “In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.”

— Tim O'Brien